February 5, 2018

Retro TV: Revisiting “Six Feet Under”

I seem to be gearing up for my first season of tv-watching in 2018, or at least I’m trying to! 😛 Still no word from SyFy about season three of The Expanse. I think I’m forgoing Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access because I’m gonna splurge for Hulu and The Handmaid’s Tale instead. Expect a book-to-adaptation review on my reading/writing blog, soon!

I won’t be watching the Olympics, I know, it’s a shande, though I will return for season 7b of Once Upon a Time. So that just leaves my HBO regimen. The first show of interest to come on the air, this Sunday, is Here and Now, the newest project of Alan Ball.

When it comes to Alan Ball’s HBO projects, I have some unexplored feels. Not so much about True Blood, which I wrote about a few times on this blog (short version: I enjoyed that show, but it ended as a hot mess. :P) No, I’m thinking about Six Feet Under.

Exciting sidenote–another big event for me on Sunday is that an anthology where I’ll be published is having its launch event. 😀 So this is making me think about my “themes” in fiction, because I’m one of those pretentious writers who gets caught up in a certain idea. For me, it’s my fear of abandonment. There’s no greater abandonment, of course, than death.

Six Feet Under takes place around the Fisher family funeral home. Most episodes start with documenting the death of a guest star, which then lends itself to the storylines of the main cast. Much of the show has to do with the drama between the two brothers who run the joint–laid back man child, Nate Jr, and rigid and closeted (to begin with) gay man, David. We also delve into the lives of their mother, Ruth, their much younger sister, Claire, and their employee, Federico. Everyone’s also a bit haunted by the “ghost” of their patriarch, Nathaniel Sr, who dies in a car crash in the first episode.

I put “ghost” in quotation marks because this isn’t a literal poltergeist. The show is relatively neutral on the afterlife, preferring to focus on the here and now (ta da ching), and the dead appear as projections of the living. It’s a built in trick to deal with inner drama. 😛

Every now and then HBO airs a few episodes of Six Feet Under, and I get sucked in a little bit. I think that the strongest storylines revolve around Nate (Peter Krause) and David (Michael C Hall.) I also had a bit of a soft spot for Claire (Lauren Ambrose) who, though much different than me, was the same age. The show basically chronicled “our” high school and college years.

When the storylines stayed close to the family and business drama, I was hooked. But a couple of subplots went off the rails and became too melodramatic–the whole incidence of Nate’s wife’s disappearance and mysterious death, and David being kidnapped and abused. Those always kept me from getting fully engrossed in the series.

I’m also a little eyebrow archy the deaths depicted–they were almost always freak accidents or intentional killings. Statistics show that most of us in the US will die of heart failure or other afflictions in our advanced years, but most victims on the show were middle aged. I suppose I have to suspend disbelief and say that most of the Fisher clientele were elderly, but they showcased the more unusual cases to complement whatever was going on with the living people.

In a way, the show was a long treatise with how to deal with the advent of death. At the end of the first season, Nate gets a harrowing brain injury diagnosis, which he succumbs to near the end of the last season. It’s one of the only times that we get a “death montage” at the end, not beginning, of an episode. But otherwise, the presentation of Nate’s death is treated like everyone else’s. Before he dies, with David seated at his bedside, we go into this strange, psychological dreamscape with their father to probe how both of the men confront this concept.

A couple of episodes later the show ends with this future-reaching montage that depicts the deaths of all of the main characters. It always makes me tear up. It’s told from Claire’s perspective, as she literally drives through time while partaking in a cross country move. Here, most characters die of more natural causes, and I wonder if we had to see the entire show before we could appreciate the relatively normal lives and deaths of the Fishers et. al. (I also love the music and am freaked out that Claire lives to be 101. At least one of us will.)

Claire’s death depresses me to a degree because we don’t see any living family members around her (I assume Ball figured that would be distracting, seeing as she outlived all of the main cast.) Instead, we see a display of all of the pictures that she took of her family–a reminder that the finality of death cannot take away from the fullness of life. The overall show proved that for most of the characters, imho, even those who didn’t live the longest.

For more ruminations by Ball and the cast on the finale, click here. I’m going into Here and Now relatively unspoiled, though it looks like it’ll be closer in tone to Six Feet than to True Blood. Hoping it lives up.

This show isn’t airing any time soon, but I’ve also been niggling over Transparent. It’s rather obviously about a transgender and gay family, but it’s also about a Jewish family. When it comes to “Jewish,” Hollywood usually depicts one of two strands–very Orthodox or very Seinfeld. 😛 But this series is about a Reform family! Progressive (and still active) Judaism ahoy! I need to see this. I’m talking myself into it. My parents have an Amazon prime account… hmm. *wheels turning*